Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize...

People dislike inflation because inflation erodes the real value of future nominal income and wealth. Adjustment of future nominal values via a cost of living index is an appropriate way to handle the problem of real income risk. Nonetheless an important aspect needs more discussion: If markets...

We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their "neighbors" and on a random signal about the...

In this paper individual overconfidence within the context of an experimental asset market is investigated. Overall, 72 participants traded one risky asset on six markets of 12 participants each. The results indicate that individuals were not generally overconfident. Moreover, overconfidence was...

Germany and the United States are generally seen as the two competing systems of corporate governance. In search for a comparative welfare analysis of the financial systems, we are interested in (i) the aggregate value-added of corporate investments in the two countries and in (ii) the...

Most models of labor markets and (un)employment neglect how competition among firms or sectors of the economy affects their hiring of workers and working times. Our approach pays special attention to such effects by proposing a complex stage game where firms invest in capital equipment before...